Asus RT-N16: impressions after using it for a while

It’s been a couple of weeks since I bought RT-N16 and during this time I’ve accumulated some experience. The most important thing that I could understand for this time – firmware from Asus – sucks, because even though it provides minimalistic features it is very unstable and does not utilize the power of router’s hardware!

Now, let me shortly review all firmwares I tried from Asus:

1.0.0.6 – was installed when I bought a router. Very unstable, huge pings to router if you visit rich flash site as youtube.com. It was impossible to talk via skype on this firmware: video and sound ware delayed, etc.

1.0.1.2 – installed it as soon as I’ve discovered that 1.0.0.6 sucks. At the beginning everything was stable, but then I got dropping wi-fi connections, even without a load.

1.0.1.3 – beta firmware from Asus, never published. Same problem as with 1.0.1.2 – network periodically disappears by itself.

1.0.1.4 – interesting firmware. A day after it was released, it was removed from Asus site, and then reappeared as another file – with different md5, creation date, but the version was exactly the same 🙂

If the company where I work treats its customers in the same way as Asus, I would already have been looking some job because of unemployment. Well, if you release 1.0.1.4 and found a bug, why not to release a corrected firmware as 1.0.1.5? And why there is no changes.log file for each firmware?

After all, it is important to know what bugs were fixed and what changes are made, because it will save time for users – if fixes are just cosmetic – there is no need to do firmware upgrade …

In 1.0.1.4 there were several critical issues which forces me to quit using Asus firmware:

1. Mystical disconnects of wi-fi

2. Asus tools are very buggy, for example, scanning does not work. Printer hungs sometimes. If you disconnect network cable or your laptop is not in the range of wifi spot the Asus tools use 100% of your CPU. Cool, huh???

3. After changing some options of router – it hangs. To remove the mystical disconnects I decided to shutdown unnecessary services, for example, upnp media server, firewall logs, etc. And what was my surprise when, after changing the options and saving them, the router after reboot did not connect the wi-fi clients!

At some point, while solving problems with Asus software, I caught myself thinking that it just sucks. I bought router to be stable and work 24×7. In fact, the RT-N16 became a capricious piece of hardware which became less stable as my old Dlink DI-524 for 40 $ 🙂

So I decided to look for something different, like dd-wrt, tomato usb mod, and oleg’s firmware. At this stage I can tell you that all three firmwares are more stable and better than Asus firmware. Make conclusions, gentlemen!

1. dd-wrt – interesting but raw firmware. It works quite stable, but to make printing or scaning work it is a pain.

2. tomato usb mod – very good firmware. The printer is fully operational just out of the box, firmware has an excellent web interface that shows you a lot of details – the noise of wifi signal, neighboring wi-fi spots, which channels they are use, etc. But at the same time I had trouble with USB flash drive formatted ext3 – it was unable to be mounted 🙁

And last, what is very important for me, with oleg’s firmware you can install via ipkg a sane scanning server on the router. Thus I was able to find a replacement for Asus Tools, I made printing and scanning work with my router.

Using ipkg I also was able to setup big amount of useful tools on the router like:

1.wakelan to turn on my computer from internet

2.vim to edit files

3.mc to browse files like in Far Manager

4.sane scanning server

5.printing server

So I am happy now 🙂 It just works and I don’t bother myself trying to dig into shitty firmware from Asus trying to explain why wifi suddenly stopped working, etc ..

yes thanks a lot for this clear and concise explanation. i have flashed my n16 with the latest oleg firmware and now i want to set up a usb hard drive for use as a network drive to be accessed by machines running both os x 10.5.8 and xp sp iii. is this possible? and is there any documentation on how to do it. i’m a newb. thanks again!

Thanks very much for that. I did as you suggested, but I still can’t get it to work. My USB disk is formatted fat32 so I can read/write to it on both XP and OS X. Should i be formatting it with another file system? Or do i need to set up ‘manual network shares list’? To access \\192.168.1.1, do I do this in finder>connect to server and just type in \\192.168.1.1? Sorry for all the questions! Total noob!

Hi
I was using TomatoUSB but I saw it is dead project now.
So I want to try the Oleg firmware.
I installed it but wow, so ugly!! It use the default ASUS gui. Is that right??
Is there no custom GUI for this?
Do you actually use this GUI or do you configure completely via ssh/console?
Because I cannot stand to look at or use this horrible GUI, no matter how strong it may be.

I am curious how you might configure such things like QoS which is very important to me because I use VoIP phone. In the GUI for QoS you have very few options. Like fore example I want to set up queue based on HW MAC address of my ip-phone. I think its not possible via gui right? So all of those things would have to be done with command line?

I am curious now if some modules like newer broadcom driver etc can be “merged” in from oleg firmware to TomatoUSB project and custom-compile a new build that has Tomato GUI but some of the newer modules from oleg. You think its possible?

Yes, the QoS is very basic, but at the same time I did not noticed it worked properly with original Asus firmware. I just don’t use it. I don’t think you can manage QoS via command line, everything is just in UI. Skype works without lags even if my channel is fully loaded.

Regarding your second question. Actually, developers from Oleg’s firmware also contributed to TomatoUsbMod – I saw a few commits from Ilya and other people. Moreover, teddy_bear (developer of TomatoUsbMod) thanked wl500g.info (Oleg firmware site) for making this mod to happen 🙂

Thanks very much for the reply Volodymyr! I followed the guide on the website, but I guess my question was how do I install other packages/ipk files. Or how do I setup what you listed above.
”
1.wakelan to turn on my computer from internet
2.vim to edit files
3.mc to browse files like in Far Manager
4.sane scanning server
5.printing server
”
These right here^.
I found this website: http://www.xtremecoders.org/forums/f78/tomato-optware-package-valerakvb-ver-11-4-a-169/

It said its supposed to be for tomato firmware. But I installed it on Oleg, and all of the packages for Optware seem to be working wonderfully. I just ran the commands:

Thanks for publishing your experiences with the RT-N16 and for your assistance above, etc. Per your recommendation, I flashed my router with Oleg’s firmware this morning. Other family members now find it easier to connect via WiFi and I’ve had no drop-out reports which is a welcome change. There are lots of useful commands already installed, in particular awk, cron, ftp, grep, gzip, sed, ssh/scp, tar, vi.

One thing I’ve noticed is that websites I’ve had a problem with now load OK. I particularly had problems with SourceForge, with some pages at that site frequently refusing to load and giving me “The connection was reset, The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading” errors. These errors started happening about the time I got the RT-N16 and coincidentally disappeared when I flashed the Oleg firmware. My daughter was also having similar problems with a few of her regular websites and those she has checked today also work fine!

It seems like default Asus firmware is not handling properly certificates, thus some pages are not loaded. What I can tell … This is a typical example on how software should not be released – it should pass some QA …

I remember searching for topics on the Asus RT-N16 after a few months of usage (and frustration) with the stock firmware. I tried DD-WRT but found that it was also unstable and decided to switch back to stock firmware. At first I was using 1.0.0.6, then I updated to 1.0.1.4, and then back to 1.0.1.2. I cannot remember which DD-WRT build I was using, but it had its issues.

Then I came across this page after browsing the Asus forums and I immediately booked marked several posts from this blog.

Yesterday I took the time to install nightly build 1925 of oleg’s firmware and it has been very solid so far.

So, I must say thank you for posting your impressions of each firmware you tested and for the guides on advanced features for the RT-N16!

A friend of mine told me at the begining “use Oleg’s firmware and it will be very stable”. But I did not listen him, and I choose a hard way by trying different firmwares 🙂 Anyway, trying different firmwares is also good, it gives you ability for the right choice …

Thank you for this. My laptops no longer have the wifi dropping issue, and my connections are more stable comparing to the out of the box setting. I’ve downloaded the recommended firmware RT-N16-1.9.2.7-rtn-r1639 and is currently using it as default setting. Hooking up an usb hard drive and sharing the data across my network is working perfectly.

However, i have a Dell laser 1110 and can’t seems to get it to work through the router. Accessing through the web interface at http://192.168.1.1, i’ve set the service Enable LPR printing to YES. That is as far as i can go in setting this router because of my lack of knowledge in this area. Are there any other setting i’ve missed? Any help will greatly be appreciated regardless. Thank you.

7. The procedure at http://oleg.wl500g.info/printing/ is for Windows 2000, but it is very simular for XP, Vista and 7 – the idea is to configure printer to print via “Standard TCP/IP Port” and specify the IP address of router.

Volodymyr Shcherbyna, thank you for your clear respond and it has provided the solution to my problem. Originally my setup was the same as that of the direction on step 6, but with one error from my part. While setting the Port setting, i’ve selected LPR for all of the machines on my network (i was looking at a google’s setup for installing a network printer). The LPR setting works originally when i was using the factory’s firmware for the RT-N16 and i assumed it would be the same switching over to Oleg’s firmware.

However, while looking at the direction from step 6, it stated that “specify 9101 for LPT printer or 9100 for USB one.” Since my printer is a USB dell 1110 which according to this would have to be set as RAW-9100 for USB. After changing the port setting from all of the network machines to RAW instead of LPR, all of the machine no longer gives print error. So, thank you for helping me figuring out this small error that was giving me second thoughts about this great firmware. Have a great weekend!

Now make sure that the printing is working when your reboot Windows, as I got one small bug with my Epson BX300F in Windows 7 x64: once printing is setup it works, but after reboot of Windows it does not 🙂

I agree that both Oleg and Tomato_USB firmwares are good options for the rt-n16.
Ive tried both myself and came up with a different opinion in favor of Oleg.
In Tomato_USB I used to rely on the GUI, mainly since its prettier, with more built-in options like bandwidth graphing, automount & scripts in the gui…but turns out the response is not always up there. Also when you throw optware installation in the equation : http://tomatousb.org/forum/t-257282/ VS http://wl500g.info/showthread.php?t=23684, Oleg has a better experience with file placement, /etc/init.d/startup & scripts, pre&post boot already available and it makes a perfect solution for simple services console management.

My main reason to getting the N16 is because of the unattended BitTorrent client to external storage capability.

Now, having used Bittorrent clients in media players and what not, it is far slower than using a PC (processing and resource power). I like your take on N16’s capability on BitTorrent be it on Tomato or Oleg.

Main thing I wish to achieve : good bittorrent processing (of course not comparing with PC) + stable Wifi-N which I read from numerous posts/threads elsewhere it may not be stable.

Thanks Volodymyr – My follow-up is pretty simple: I have a concern that the printer I want to attach is not on the list of supported Asus devices. Does that matter? It is well supported in the Open Source community. Am I too cautious? :->

Depends on printer and firmware you are going to use. Default Asus firmware is trying to make a proxy between the drivers installed on Windows machine and the printer attached to RT-N16. However, if one will take a look at code (firmware is open source) he/she will noticed ugly tricks trying to accomplish this (shame on Asus developers), as a result – official firmware is very buggy and unstable regarding printing functionality – printing does not work, on Windows machine 100% of CPU us used by Asus helper service, etc.

At the same time, if you are going to use Tomato or Oleg firmware, it is using CUPs sorry, it is using p910nd daemon which is using minimal code to map usb port into tcp port on router, thus, some fancy features of your printer would not work, but the basic printing should work. In order to accomplish this, you will have to setup printer via Standard TCP/IP Port. You can read more about daemon here: http://p910nd.sourceforge.net/

I have installed tomato usb latest firmware build 54 for k 2.6. I have installed transmission daemon to the jffs of the router rt-n16. Everything works fine, except the PRINTER. I have installed the printer to standard TCP/IP port with my router’s ip address (192.168.1.254) in RAW (Port : 9100) and also LPR. But nothing works. I get an error saying “incorrect port” whenever I give a print.

I have scanned with nmap & it says “Discovered open port 9100/tcp on 192.168.1.254”. Hence I presume that the port 9100 is open on the router. My printer is Canon LBP 2900 laser printer. Is the p910nd print server actually running on my router. I don’t understand…. Please help.

So, the port 9100 is open … And do you see your printer in “USB and NAS” section in router web-page?

Click on “USB support” page, it should show your printer in “Attached Devices”.

Another thing which may happen is that the printer drivers running on your windows machine are not working with the TCP/IP Port. Try to install wireshark on your windows machine and sniff traffic by filter

tcp port 9100

And make some printing by looking into wireshark. Does your machine attempts to make connection to send data?

HI
Actually I forgot to mention it earlier. Yes my printer is showing in the router usb page under host Ip0. When I give a print, the printer status window opens & says incorrect port. Then a error message comes in the taskbar, saying that the document has failed to print. When I click the error message, the printer queue window opens which shows the status as “error-printing”, then after a second the status changes to “printing” and then the job vanishes leaving the queue window blank. When I uncheck the option Bi-directional support from the printer pproperties>ports page and give a print, it doesn’t give the “incorrect port error”, and the printer status window shows “getting status” and it remains like that, but doesn’t print. One more thing, by adding the printer through TCP/IP port > RAW > 9100, my printer always shows as ” Ready” in my computer’s Printer & FAxes window. Even when I switch off the printer attached to my router Asus RT-N16, it doesn’t show as offline in my PC, but shows ” Ready”.
As u have advised I will try the Wireshark tomorrow as it is already about 10.00 P’M’ in the night in India, I tried to explain all the odds I have noticed regarding my printer if it could help you better understand the problem. If needed you can access my pc through teamviewer and test all the possibilities yourself. If you feel like, please let me know a convenient time.

Hi
I just got one step forward. Actually I tried with another printer Canon IP1880 which is detecting in the router and with the TCP/IP port 9100 (Raw), when I give a print, it prints fine in my tomato rt-n16. Only I have to remove bi-directional support from both the router & the windows printer, otherwise big prints are halting in between. So now I ubderstand the router firmware is working fine. The problem is with the printer driver of Canon LBP 2900. Can u please help me with a universal driver or something of that sort which supports, Canon LBP 2900 laser printer so that I can make my printer work with the tomato usb. Is there any sort of software or utility like the Asus printer utility which actually maps the TCP/IP port of the router to USB001 local port of the computer, and the printer installs as a local printer & gives steady print. The Asus printer utility works only with their firmware (that is natural). Hope I can now get a solution from you.
Please reply asap.
Thanx

I installed Oleg (version RT-N16-1.9.2.7-rtn-r1639.trx.zip) last October and it has been wroking very well. I wanted to check my configuration and somehow I can’t access 192.168.1.1 vai firefox or IE anymore. It doesn’t connect. The router is still working, just can’t be accessed. Has anyone had similar experience? Any suggestions?
Fung, 2011-02-08.

How exactly it does not connect? It rejects the password or it even does not prompt for password? I remember both problems on Oleg firmware. If it even does not prompt for password, most likely, router does not listen on port 80. Somehow, it happened for me that it started to listen on 8080. So try http://192.168.1.1:8080 or scan all ports of router to determine which one it listens to.

If it listens on 80 but rejects your password – try to a shorter one. I remember that I cut password to 21 character – without any warnings.

Salut,
I tried http://192.168.1.1 using Firefox, it returned with message: “The connection was reset…The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading. * The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments. * If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer’s network connection. * If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.” It didn’t bring me to the GUI login page to prompt for password at all.
Immediately after installing Oleg, I had no problem accessing the login page. The firmware has been working so steadily I didn’t have to login to the router for a long time, until now. It is still working. The printer is still printing. The printer port is still 192.168.1.1 and the raw port is still 9100.
What can I try next?
Does this mean I have to get back to the original ASUS factory state? I wonder if this is a known problem with Oleg? Is Tomato better more reliable?
Thanks again…
Fung

Did you try to reboot router (unplug power, wait and plug it in again). Does this changes something? If after reboot you can access web page, most likely there is a memory leak there, which escalates with time.

I’ll try reboot the RT-N16 tonight and report result to this blog. Hopefully I can gain access to the Oleg GUI.

I remember reading somewhere that not loo long ago you reported you had a serious problem after upgrading Oleg to a newer version and after that you switched to Tomato USB. Which version of Tomato USB would you recommend? I would like to connect a USB external hard drive to the USB port so that all my computers , wired or wireless, can access the hard drive. The hard drive is of course windows format. Will Tomato USB firmware support such a configuration?

Recycled RT-N16 power this morning. Now I can login as usual. You are right that it must have some kind of memory hiccup.

Any idea how to setup a USB device in Oleg? It doesn’t seem to auto-detect when I plug in a USB memory stick. Ultimately I would like to connect an external USB hard drive to it. There are 2 USB slots at the back—one is being used for the printer, leaving one available.

I see that it can also support webcam for security monitoring. Wonder how to set that up as well.

Is there a link to detailed documentation for Oleg?

Looks like you are quite happy with Tomato USB firmware. How do you compare Oleg to TomatoUSB? What should I do if I were to switch to Tomato USB? The tomatousb/download site has a fairly detailed step-by-step guide. I get a bit worried when it says it is normal to hang during setup. i also wonder if the I can switch back to Oleg or ASUS’s factory firmware after installing TomatoUSB.

My family is unhappy to when the router is down, so I am under pressure to make sure it gets back up ASAP.

I guess you will have to setup ipkg on Oleg in order to install ntfs or fat32 driver. By default it supports ext2/3 (if I recall correctly). Webcams should work out of the box, as the protocol is standard. You may also consider using usb hub to use all three (HDD; Printer; WebCam).

Regarding hungs of Tomato during upgrade. It never happened to me. In any case, before I start flashing I do pinging of router in cmd window:

ping 192.168.1.1 -t

And I start flashing. I can monitor when router reboots and when after reboot it starts to reply to pings. Of course you can switch back to Oleg from Tomato. Once you flash it, you are free to flash anything else afterwards.

Looks like setting up ipkg on Oleg to install USB external HDD with ntfs or fat32 format is quite an intense process, and also the content of the USB hard drive will be lost during the setup process.
Is that the same for the Tomato firmware? That is, do I need to setup up ipkg in order to install ntfs in order to use the USB device?
Thanks again,
Fung

In order to setup ipkg you will have to have ext2 or ext3 installed. You can’t install it on ntfs. If you don’t want to loose data, you can use an old flash drive and usb hub: there is no need to use external hard drive for this. Old usb flash drive should do the job.

Sorry for the intrusion but I am a total newbie at this.
I bought the RT-n16 last week and have seen your web and am already finding the router drops out and even hangs using ASUS own firmware.

Could you help out and spell out “exactly what I need to do’ in simple steps, to change to the best firmware in your view for the n16.

I have comcast cable & a !! motorola modem (will change that later) any sugestions?. I need wireless for the PC (wood floors and no attic access) & ps3 for games & netflicks and vonage for phone. Have managed to get vonage to work on n16 lan port 4! want printer and USB later on.

I saw your instructions for oleg install, but could you give a “firmware upgrade for dummy’s” on tomato if you think that is the best firmware now. otherwise I will grit my teeth and try your set of instructions of oleg load – just worried at bricking if I do something wrong.

PC=gateway.i7 running Vista – likely upgrade to 7 later as vista is beginning to give me problems. I also use Acronis for system preservation. Need all the help I can get. G

When I used the Asus utilities to upload the firmware, first it said uploading, which took a short while,, then it said restoring system, which took a very long time, but eventually finished. Is this normal? Is this because it is copying from memory to flash? (Afterwards it did seem as if tomato was installed..) I followed the tutorial you linked a few posts above – http://tomatousb.org/tut:installing-on-asus-rt-n16

I have a RT_N16 and using Oleg’s firmware since I bought it (like one year). Very smooth and stable.
But recently I have a NAS that can do UPNP. Inside last firmware of Oleg (1.9.2.7-rtn-r2972) you can find the Upnp option at IPConfig/Miscellaneous and has 3 choises “No, Yes, Report WAN address and Yes, report MAN address” I have tried both WAN and MAN (yes options) and NAS utility says my router cannot do Upnp.

How can I get the Upnp to work? Is is fully supported with this latest firmware (1.9.2.7-rtn-r2972)?

Disclamer: These posting and software on this blog are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
This web-blog is maintained on my free time, and has nothing to do with my current employer.